“And wasn’t it enough?”

In spite of her growing dread, Diane brought out the question firmly.  Mrs. Eveleth sat one long minute motionless, with hands clasped, with lips parted, and with suspended breath.

“No.”

The monosyllable seemed to fill the room.  It echoed and re-echoed in Diane’s ears like the boom of a cannon.  While her outward vision took in such details as the despair in Mrs. Eveleth’s face, the folds of crape on her gown, the Watteau picture on the panel of moss-green and gold that formed the background, all the realities of life seemed to be dissolving into chaos, as the glories of the sunset sink into a black and formless mass.  When Mrs. Eveleth spoke again, her voice sounded as though it came from far away.

“I want to take all the blame upon myself.  If it hadn’t been for me, George would never have gone to such extremes.”

“Extremes?”

Diane spoke not so much from the desire to speak as from the necessity of forcing her reeling intelligence back to the world of fact.

“I’m afraid there’s no other word for it.”

“Do you mean that there are debts?”

“A great many debts.”

“Can’t they be paid?”

“Most of them can be paid—­perhaps all; but when that is done I’m afraid there will be very little left.”

“But surely we haven’t lived so extravagantly as that.  I know I’ve spent a great deal of money—­”

“It hasn’t been altogether the style of living.  When my poor boy saw that he was going beyond his means he tried to recoup himself by speculation.  Do you know what that is?”

“I know it’s something by which people lose money.”

“He had no experience of anything of the kind, and his men of business tell me he went into it wildly.  He had that optimistic temperament which always believes that the next thing will be a success, even though the present one is a failure.  Then, too, he fell into the hands of unscrupulous men, who made him think that great fortunes were to be made out of what they call wildcat schemes, when all the time they were leading him to ruin.”

Ruin!  The word appealed to Diane’s memory and imagination alike.  It came to her from her remotest childhood, when she could remember hearing it applied to her grandfather, the old Comte de la Ferronaise.  After that she could recollect leaving the great chateau in which she was born, and living with her parents, first in one European capital, and then in another.  Finally they settled for a few years in Ireland, her mother’s country, where both her parents died.  During all this time, as well as in the subsequent years in a convent at Auteuil, she was never free from the sense of ruin hanging over her.  Though she understood well enough that her way of escape lay in making a rich marriage, it was impressed upon her that the meagreness of her dot would make her efforts in this direction difficult.  When, within a few months of leaving